Rust never sleeps here at Australian Wine and Drinks Review, which is why even on a long weekend trip to the nation’s capital with Mrs Ozwinereview and our cherub, a fair selection of wines came along for the journey.
What a pleasure that this new Ghostgum Vineyard Pinot Noir 2023 was in the box.
Ghostgum is part of the new Southern Light Vineyards single-vineyard project from the Joval family empire. The 2022 wines were hits last year, and based on this singular sample, the 2023s might be even better. It’s delicious.
That’s even more surprising because 2023 was anything but easy on the Peninsula. Late, wet, low-yielding, it was a vintage full of hurdles. Not as hard as in the Yarra, but challenging is the right word.
You wouldn’t know it with the style here. It’s just 13% alcohol, but the ripeness is perfect. There’s this tart raspberry freshness here – you can almost taste the raspberry fur. It’s fresh, pithy, with a vanilla oak lift through the middle. Just medium bodied, lucid, carefully done. It feels like a wine that was agonised over, with the lack of any impurity in a rough year a pointer to some hard calls in the vineyard.
A win.
- Best drinking: nowish. Why keep it.
- Score (out of 20): 18.7
- Score (out of 100): 95
- Alcohol %: 13
- RRP (in $AUD): 90
- Winery website: https://www.southernlightvineyards.com.au/
- Would I buy it?: sure would
THE VERDICT
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5 Comments
I’ve tasted / purchased the recently released ’23 Moorooduc Estate McIntyre and Robinson Pinots, and the ’23 Hurley Lodestone and Garamond. All even better that ’22s which were very good. The 23’s are delightful.
Fascinating that a vintage described as ‘one that tested the resilience of vignerons across the Peninsula’ delivers the goods. I’ve had a bunch of middling 23 Yarra releases lately, quite a contrast.
Hello Andrew, Phillip here – ex Curly Flat, now with a new vineyard at Little Hampton (Shimora), near Trentham. I am intrigued by your comment “It’s just 13% alcohol, but the ripeness is perfect”. Intrigued because I don’t think that alcohol level and ripeness are necessarily closely correlated. For example in the hot vintage of 2008 the Curly Flat Pinot was 12.5% (the lowest of all the Pinots at the Victorian Pinot Workshop of that vintage) and my only explanation is it was due to the ambient yeasts of that vintage. Some years later 2012, the alcohol was 14.2%, one of the highest at the Pinot Workshop. So natural yeast ferments can throw up some interesting sugar/alcohol conversions. Our first vintages from the new vineyard (2024 and 2025) are yet to be released but both will be below 13% and both were harvested at good flavour ripeness. According to Dr Erika Winter’s climate studies, our vineyard is the coolest in the Macedon Ranges; not surprising given the 760 metres elevation. All that aside, I am not surprised by your review of The Ghostgum Pinot. Anthony and the vineyard team at Joval are producing great wines.
Wonderful insights there Phillip. The alcohol vs ripeness relationship is indeed a loose correlation, and my line was more a recognition that lots of Mornington Pinot is more like 13.5% in the recent era.
Hi Andrew – yes, spot on given the context of other Mornington Pinots of 2023. I will get my act together and send you some wines, including the Koshu We make in Japan